The ghost of Ben is everywhere in this select shrine

Ian Wooldridge

Last updated at 00:00 14 July 1999

IT MAY have fewer AA stars than the flash new hotel and clubhouse complex across the road but we have surely landed the most coveted address in all Carnoustie: the Ben Hogan Suite in the Hogan House Hotel.

Carnoustie adopted him as its own American son just as St Andrews, that deadly rival across the bay, adopted Bobby Jones. And here we are, encamped for this 128th Open Championship, in his shrine. His ghost is omnipresent.

Ben Hogan, in oils, water colours and silhouette, adorns every wall. Ben Hogan memorabilia abounds. There are framed letters from Ben Hogan and, apart from one precious volume stolen recently, one of the most comprehensive libraries about Ben Hogan in the world.

There is an advertisement of Ben Hogan endorsing the superior flavour of Chesterfield cigarettes.

A back-view of Ben Hogan driving is on every menu. And, central to it all, is the entire front page of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram announcing Ben Hogan's death, at the age of 84, in l997.

An extraordinary facet of all this veneration is that Ben Hogan only ever came to Scotland once and was so disgusted with Carnoustie's philistine plumbing arrangements that he announced he was returning to America by the next plane.

He'd been booked into the Bruce Hotel - now transformed into luxury residential apartments but then the poshest pull-up for star golfers in town - only to discover that in l953 the sophistication of the en-suite bathroom was not yet widespread.

It was his wife, Valerie, who avoided an international incident.

She found alternative accommodation suitable to his status and acquired a permanent chauffeur.

Thus appeased Hogan, already 40 and handicapped by the permanent disabilities inflicted by a near-fatal car crash four years earlier, played and achieved what many deem the greatest Open Championship victory.

Down the years there has been a lot of competition but those who witnessed it, not to mention many who claimed to have done but did not, are convinced that it was incomparable in both physical courage and technical near-perfection on the final day.

Only a great player can win at Carnoustie. Only great players ever have: Tommy Armour, Henry Cotton, Gary Player, Tom Watson and Hogan. Only a great player will win it this year. Luck does not enter into the equation. It certainly did not for Hogan that last day when, in cold and driving rain, his injuries aching and a raging temperature of 103F that required a shot of penicillin, he was first round in 70 in the morning to share the lead, then, in the afternoon, smashed the course record with a 68 to win by four shots.

That last round inspired some of golf's finest writing, particularly his negotiation of the perilously narrow, achingly long sixth hole where he is said to have struck his second shot in the afternoon absolutely alongside the divot mark he had scarred there in the morning. Such stories tend to get longer in the telling but there is no-one in Carnoustie who doubts it. They named the sixth Hogan's Alley and, when hearing of this back in America, Hogan wrote to express his pleasure. His letter is in my hotel.

I never met him and, such was his single-mindedness and self-absorption, I don't think I would have cared for him very much. He was certainly not from the same mould as Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Peter Thomson, great champions, every bit as dedicated, but with capacities for courtesy and charm.

Hogan, they say, never gave autographs, however politely they were requested. And Gary Player recalls an incident early in his career when he plucked up courage to phone the great man at his Texas home to ask about a certain intricacy of the golf swing.

'Who's your sponsor?' asked Hogan. 'Dunlop,' Player replied.

'Then go ask Mr Dunlop,' said Hogan. These tales have never dented Carnoustie's idola try. They needed an icon of their own to keep up with St Andrews.

There is intense rivalry between the great cathedral golf courses up here and Carnoustie, with its murderous 7,361 yards and unrelenting rough, has smouldered with resentment for 24 years that it has not hosted an Open Championship until now while that preening St Andrews pitch-and-putt outfit just across the water has staged four.

In truth, Carnoustie had only itself to blame. Its clubhouse for years had looked like a Nazi blockhouse and the residential infrastructure, even when the plumbing had improved, was minimal.

Well, they've blown up the blockhouse and built one good hotel at a remarkable pace, but the cast of this great event this week are still scattered wide across the hinterland and there is some apprehension about how it will cope with traffic that has increased threefold since l975.

Carnoustie is as Scottish as the name implies: a one-street, two-storeyed town, sparse of population, grey in colour, dour of aspect, where, apart from the new hotel, the most recent sign of progress is a church transformed into a pub.

Where it stands alone is that it has the toughest golf course in Great Britain and if the weather turns sour at the weekend the scores could be astronomical. The Duke of York played here last weekend and, fine golfer that he has become in his second bachelorhood, Buckingham Palace have slapped a D-Notice on his score.

Already several prominent Americans have backed out of the challenge (the ever courteous Sir Michael Bonallack, secretary of the Royal & Ancient presiding over his last Open, says that mostly their excuses are justified) but already the mood among many of the professionals gathering here is that Carnoustie, with its perilous rough and constricted landing areas from the tees, is unfair.

Well, it might seem unfair to those who assume their professional integrity will be impugned if the winning score isn't somewhere between 12 and 15 under par. But par means nothing here.

And nor, if the weather gets up, will prescribed yardages. This is golf in the raw and as the rugged Carnoustie members play it, week in, week out.

It is why the memory of Ben Hogan is so revered here. He came and prevailed against the world, the weather and his own sickness. His prize money today wouldn't buy a television set which was maybe why he never came back.

Nor did he ever take the short trip around or across the bay to set his eyes on St Andrews. Meccas were not on his agenda.

It is all in the archives here at the Hogan House Hotel, 60 yards from Carnoustie's first tee.

There is a sad postscript.

Valerie Hogan, the wife who stopped her man from walking out in l953, died last week.